MySQL dump of GNOME bugzilla database?

From: Patrick Wagstrom <patrick wagstrom net>

To: academia-list gnome org

Subject: MySQL dump of GNOME bugzilla database?

Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 16:46:43 -0400

Hi There!

I originally sent this message to bugmaster gnome org a little over a week ago, but haven't gotten a response, so I'm hoping that someone is lurking here on the academia list that might be able to help us out.

About seven years ago, while working on my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, I started an archive of nearly all the activity in GNOME as a database for academic researchers. This included automatically retrieved sources such as mailing lists, source code, and blog entries. Sometime, I believe in 2005, we were able to get a dump of the Bugzilla mysql database from Luis Villa. This provided a much needed missing component for academic researchers about how work gets assigned and passed around. Unfortunately, while we've moved ahead and continue to gather data from source code archives, mailings lists, and blogs, the bug data is now woefully out of date. Is it possible to get an updated dump of the database?

If you're wondering what's been done with the data here's some examples:

2 papers presented at Academy of Management 2010 -- one addressing how teams communicate and coordinate, the other addressing the impact of commercial developers on volunteers

2 papers submitted to the 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

A paper and tool presentation at the 2009 International Conference on Software Engineering

The best paper from the 2006 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

Submissions in progress to IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and Information Systems Review

Numerous submissions to academic workshops, conferences,and journals

Although I compiled this data while a student at Carnegie Mellon University, it has now moved out to numerous other universities and research institutes. I know that individuals from the following institutions are currently conducting research with the data:

Carnegie Mellon University

University of Nebraska, Lincoln

American University

IBM Research

In addition, we're willing to work with folks in GNOME and the GNOME Foundation to make the data available to other academics, possibly by contributing the data to the FLOSSMole project, a cross-institutional project that works to provide open source datasets to academic researchers.

Thank you for your time and please let me know what we can do to help get this critical updated data,